Randall Balestriero successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Max-Affine Splines Insights Into Deep Learning. Randall's next stop is NYU for a postdoc with deep learning pioneer Prof. Yann LeCun , who is also VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and an ACM Turing Award Laureate.

P. K. Kota, D. LeJeune, R. A. Drezek, R. G. Baraniuk, "Extreme Compressed Sensing of Poisson Rates from Multiple Measurements," arxiv.org/abs/2103.08711, March 15, 2021.

Compressed sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique that enables the efficient recovery of a sparse high-dimensional signal from low-dimensional measurements. In the multiple measurement vector (MMV) framework, a set of signals with the same support must be recovered from their corresponding measurements. Here, we present the first exploration of the MMV problem where signals are independently drawn from a sparse, multivariate Poisson distribution. We are primarily motivated by a suite of biosensing applications of microfluidics where analytes (such as whole cells or biomarkers) are captured in small volume partitions according to a Poisson distribution. We recover the sparse parameter vector of Poisson rates through maximum likelihood estimation with our novel Sparse Poisson Recovery (SPoRe) algorithm. SPoRe uses batch stochastic gradient ascent enabled by Monte Carlo approximations of otherwise intractable gradients. By uniquely leveraging the Poisson structure, SPoRe substantially outperforms a comprehensive set of existing and custom baseline CS algorithms. Notably, SPoRe can exhibit high performance even with one-dimensional measurements and high noise levels. This resource efficiency is not only unprecedented in the field of CS but is also particularly potent for applications in microfluidics in which the number of resolvable measurements per partition is often severely limited. We prove the identifiability property of the Poisson model under such lax conditions, analytically develop insights into system performance, and confirm these insights in simulated experiments. Our findings encourage a new approach to biosensing and are generalizable to other applications featuring spatial and temporal Poisson signals.

Rice DSP faculty Yingyan Lin has received an NSF CAREER award for her project "Differentiable Network-Accelerator Co-Search – Towards Ubiquitous On-Device Intelligence and Green AI."  The project has two main aims:  first, to bridge the vast gap between deep learning's prohibitive computational and energy complexity and the constrained resources of consumer devices, and second to reduce the sizable environmental pollution that stems from energy-intensive deep learning training.

Rice DSP faculty member Santiago Segarra has been awarded the 2020 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper award for his paper entitled, "Network Topology Inference from Spectral Templates" that was co-authored with Antonio G. Marques, Gonzalo Mateos, and Alejandro Ribeiro and appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks.  (Read more)

DSP alum Justin Romberg (PhD, 2003), Schlumberger Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, has been awarded the 2021 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Medal. He and his co-awardees Emmanuel Candes of Stanford University and Terrance Tao of UCLA will receive the highest honor in the field of signal processing for "groundbreaking contributions to compressed sensing."

Justin joins Rice DSP alum Jim McClellan (PhD, 1973), John and Marilu McCarty Chair of Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and Rice DSP emeritus faculty member C. Sidney Burrus  as recipients of this honor.

 

 

Rice DSP and ECE alums Marco Duarte, Jason Laska, Mark Davenport, Dharmpal.Takhar, and Ting Sun plus faculty Kevin Kelly and Richard Baraniuk have been awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for the paper "Single-Pixel Imaging via Compressive Sampling: Building Simpler, Smaller, and Less-Expensive Digital Cameras", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, March 2008.

 

Michael Wakin (PhD, 2006), a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, has been elected an IEEE Fellow. Mike's previous awards include an NSF Math Sciences Postdoc Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for his work in sparsity, compressive sensing, and dimensionality reduction.

DSP alum Christopher Metzler (PhD, 2018) will join the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland in January 2021.  An expert in computational imaging, image processing, and machine learning, Chris has received the NDSEG, NSF, and K2I Fellowships and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.

Chris made the news earlier this year with his work on seeing around corners in Science and OSA.

 

Learning-based methods, and in particular deep neural networks, have emerged as highly successful and universal tools for image and signal recovery and restoration. They achieve state-of-the-art results on tasks ranging from image denoising, image compression, and image reconstruction from few and noisy measurements. They are starting to be used in important imaging technologies, for example in GEs newest computational tomography scanners and in the newest generation of the iPhone.

The field has a range of theoretical and practical questions that remain unanswered. In particular, learning and neural network-based approaches often lack the guarantees of traditional physics-based methods. Further, while superior on average, learning-based methods can make drastic reconstruction errors, such as hallucinating a tumor in an MRI reconstruction or turning a pixelated picture of Obama into a white male.

This virtual workshop aims at bringing together theoreticians and practitioners in order to chart out recent advances and discuss new directions in deep neural network-based approaches for solving inverse problems in the imaging sciences and beyond.

The NeurIPS workshop will take place online either December 11 or 12 (TBD). At the workshop, we will have contributed talks as well as contributed posters. Detailed information about the scope of the workshop can be found at https://deep-inverse.org/, including directions for submission. Submission at OpenReview will be open from September 1 until the submission deadline of October 2, 2020. The session is being co-organized by RIce DSP Alum faculty member Reinhard Heckel, Rice Alum faculty member Paul Hand, Soheil Feizi, Lenka Zdeborova, and Rice DSP faculty Richard Baraniuk.

DSP PhD student Tan Nguyen has received a prestigious Computing Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship (CIFellows Program) from the Computing Research Association (CRA).  He plans to work with Professor Stan Osher at UCLA on predicting drug-target binding affinity to study how current drugs work on new targets as a treatment for COVID-19 and future pandemic diseases.  Tan plans to develop a new class of deep learning models that are aware of the structural information of drugs, scalable to large datasets, and generalizable to unseen cases.